


All I Have to Give

by vulcansmirk



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coda, Episode: s08e23 Sacrifice, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 15:45:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/869223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vulcansmirk/pseuds/vulcansmirk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel wanders back to the bunker, a man, not an angel. Set directly after "Sacrifice."</p>
            </blockquote>





	All I Have to Give

Castiel showed up on the Winchesters’ doorstep in the long hours of the night. The skies, which for so many hours had been flooded with the diamond-bright lights of falling angels, were dark once more; an endless layer of cloud obscured the heavens – but Dean supposed it didn’t matter now, seeing that they were empty. A light rain misted through the humming summer air.

Dean was pissed. He’d gotten home with Sam (hauled him up the stairs, clapped a hand on his shoulder, met his eyes with a warm smile and sent him straight to bed) and set to pacing across the war room floor. He paced for hours, until he swore he’d left a long, narrow divot in his wake. Then there was a dull tapping from the direction of the door – so faint he almost didn’t hear it – and Dean ceased his pacing, shoulders still tense as he crept, wary, down the hall.

His anger, a writhing, swelling flame in the pit of his stomach, went out with a hiss and a tiny puff of smoke the moment he opened the door. Amber light flooded the little stone covey surrounding the bunker’s entryway; there was no eave to provide the place shelter, and Cas lay folded in a small, sopping heap in the mud. His trenchcoat was so blackened that Dean could no longer tell what color it was.

The angel looked up at the deep groan of the door’s hinges. His hair lay flat against his head, black with mud and rain. The blue of his eyes was dim, blank.

Dean had been all ready, when Cas returned (if he returned, and wasn’t that always the question?) to tear him a new one, but the words toppled now like mortarless stones from his tongue. With lips pressed tightly together and hands forcibly wrenched out of fists, he leaned out into the rain and hoisted Castiel inside.

 

Cas was conscious, but only just. His lips moved with unintelligible half-sleep murmurs, and his head lolled on his shoulders as Dean wrapped a firm hand around his waist, pulled him close. He was just as big as he’d always been, but he seemed small. Dean carried him upstairs.

He justified taking Castiel to his own room by arguing (with whom? With himself? Did it even matter? Who was he fooling?) that his room was closest. First door on the left at the top of the stairs. The truth was that there was a perfectly serviceable guest bedroom just next door, but Dean cringed at the thought of leaving Cas there. As angry as he was, that room seemed… cold. Unlived-in. Stupidly, he wanted something better for Cas.

Dean stripped Cas, gingerly and impersonally, of his sodden clothes, replacing them with a clean pair of his own boxers and and an old ratty AC/DC shirt before tucking him snugly beneath Dean’s own blankets. The angel slept. (Was he an angel anymore? A thrill shot up Dean’s spine.) Castiel tossed and turned fitfully, murmured more, and louder, in the quiet of pre-dawn. Dean hoped, passingly, that Cas’s restlessness wouldn’t wake Sam, but he doubted it would. They were both so tired. Dean was tired, too.

He sat up waiting, though he couldn’t have said why. His eyelids drooped, and his limbs sagged, but his brain buzzed like a fluorescent light bulb nearing the end of its life, oscillated constantly between intense concern and overpowering anger and unspeakable remorse. And what did he have to be sorry for? He waited.

Cas woke. Dean almost didn’t notice, he was so quiet about it; but he’d stopped tossing beneath the sheets, and Dean glanced up to find Castiel’s clear blue eyes on him. His fury flared up anew. He stood from where he’d been sitting in that rickety wooden chair across the room – for how long? He couldn’t see outside – and stalked toward the bed.

_“You didn’t answer me,”_ Dean hissed. There were a million other things he could have said, but that was what his brain landed on first.

Cas just set his jaw, and kept looking.

“I’m getting real sick of this, Cas,” continued Dean, voice a low rumble. “I’m sick of you not answering. I’m sick of you skipping out and not telling us when you’ll be back. If you’ll be back. I don’t expect you to be on a leash, man, but you gotta understand. We need to know where you are.”

Castiel made no reply.

Dean’s voice rose. “Do you understand me?  _We’re family,_  Cas. I meant it when I said it in the crypt, and I mean it now.” Dean’s jaw twinged at the memory of that night. “Me and Sammy, we care about you. I know that’s kinda hard for you to understand, but I thought it’d be easier, after all we’ve been through. I thought you’d get it by now. We need you, man. You can’t keep walking out.”

Cas turned his head away, and something glistened on his cheek. Dean faltered.

A long, thick silence took over. Dean stared incredulously at Cas, and Cas stared fixedly at the bed. At his own hand, where it rested, limp. He opened his mouth to speak, and his voice was like that of a smoker on his deathbed.

“I didn’t hear you,” Cas rasped. “I didn’t… I couldn’t. I made a mistake.” His face contorted, his fingers tightening into a fist around the sheets. He cleared his throat. “You were right. Naomi was right. Metatron, he was… he was evil. And I let him fool me. I let him control me, just like all the others. I was his puppet, his hammer. And now…”

His voice softened, his muscles relaxed. “Heaven is ruined, Dean. The angels are dead, or fallen. And I have nothing left to offer you.”

A shudder took hold of Dean’s ribs and held on, aching. He felt the specter of wetness on his fingers, saw the glitter of it on Cas’s cheeks, in Cas’s blue eyes. He knew what Cas was saying.  _I fell._  And,  _I’m worthless._

Shakily, Dean sat on the edge of the bed. Took one of Castiel’s hands in one of his own. Ghosted another hand beneath Cas’s chin (felt the warmth of his tears) and drew him up, softly, to meet Dean’s eye.

“I couldn’t give two shits about your mojo, Cas.” He spread gossamer fingers along the side of Cas’s neck, resting his ring finger on the tip of Cas’s spine. “Is that what you think? That I only want you around because you’re an angel?”  _Were,_  he corrected himself.

Cas just looked at him, blinking quickly.

“Cas.” And, entirely inappropriately, Dean wanted to smile. It tugged at his lips in a watery, quivery sort of way.

Dean pulled Cas forward, pressed their foreheads together. Reveled in the warmth of Cas’s breath on his cheek.  _He’s breathing._

“I don’t need you for your mojo,” Dean said. “I need you for  _you._  How can you not see that? We’re  _family,_ Cas. Whether you’re an angel or not. And honestly, I think I’d prefer it if you couldn’t zap out whenever, because I always have to wonder if you’re coming back.”

Dean drew back then, planted both hands on Cas’s shoulders and looked him square in the eye.

“I was angry because I was worried about you. That’s all. I need to know where you are. I need to know you’re safe.” 

He remembered, then, the feeling of Cas’s palm on his cheek, and a relief that skated across his skin like clear water. Dean cupped Castiel’s face in his hand.

"We’ll figure this out," he said, and let out that smile. “We always do."

Dean could see it the moment Cas’s defenses crumbled. His face collapsed, his eyes fell shut. His body tipped forward and Dean caught it soundly. He’d never seen Castiel cry before.

Cas shivered, his shoulders jumping with the occasional tiny sob. Dean held onto him like a sailor holding fast to the rigging of his ship on stormy seas. He would make Cas still, he decided. He would bring him peace. Dean thought maybe, in that too-big heart of his, despite all they’d been through, and all he’d done, that was what Cas had wanted all along.


End file.
